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TGF News Briefs

From our fabulous News Hawks!

Have you seen a TG-related news story online or in your local paper? Send it in to TGF and become a News Hawk! Don't assume we know everything that's out there, because you are our eyes and ears. To file and story, send it in to Cindy.

FBI Seeking Woman Bigamist Born Male

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The FBI is hunting for a woman who had four husbands at once and who deserted from the Marine Corps nearly 30 years ago while still a man, the bureau said.

Erica Sandra Kay, 47, was born Eddie James Mundell and was declared absent without leave in 1968 from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, according to FBI agent Tim Coakley. She is wanted on fraud and desertion charges, he said.

Mundell underwent a sex change operation two years later and changed her name, he said.

"She suckered all of us," said Ammadell Whitsell, whose nephew John Bowers, 50, of Jasper, Georgia, married Kay in 1996, while she was still married to a man in Ellijay, Ga., and another man in Ohio.

Kay left Bowers two months after the wedding, driving off in his new Mercury Mountaineer and taking his gold watch and about $90,000 Coakley said.

Last New Year's Eve, Kay met painting contractor Ralph Caruso, 68, who lived in St. Petersburg, Florida and was on a gambling trip to Biloxi, Mississippi, shortly after his wife of 25 years had died. Caruso and Kay exchanged wedding vows in Las Vegas last April, Coakley said.

"She convinced him she was a successful interior designer," Coakley said. "They set up shop in St. Petersburg and she started running up bills. She told him she was pregnant. They even went so far as to put a nursery in the house."

Coakley said Kay left Caruso in late October, driving off in his 1983 Cadillac Eldorado. The Mercury Mountaineer was found abandoned on a St. Petersburg street.

Drag for Jagger

Mick Jagger says he looks smashing as a woman. The Rolling Stone has what he calls a "small role but a large cameo" in the movie "Bent," a story of homosexual love set against Nazi persecution. "I'm quite happy in drag," Jagger told USA Today. "It's a serious film but my part is comedic. And I loved dressing up, finding the right costumes." Jagger, who plays a cross-dressing nightclub chanteuse, says he wanted to wear a short dress but was overruled. Meanwhile, his production company is busy with three projects and he's co-writing and co-producing a film about the music business with Martin Scorsese.

This is by no means the first drag turn for Mick. In the 1970 film "Performance" he played a cross-dressing rocker in a role that was well-received by the critics. Jagger has also reportedly turned up at swanky events in an evening gown.

Hanson Grounded

The Tulsa-based, teenage musical group Hanson were prevented by their parents from appearing on the transvestite RuPaul's VH-1 show, reports New York's Daily News. No reason was given as to why.

Thai Recruits Using Implants To Avoid Army?

Thailand's Army decided it was turning away more male draftees than it could afford to because they were gay and/or in the process of gender reassignment -- concepts the Army appears to have trouble distinguishing from each other. The Army is convinced that a number of recruits obtain small breast implants strictly as a means to avoid required military service. Now, that may get them out of the trenches, but not out of the Army, where they're often posted to secretarial work.

One officer told the Sydney "Daily Telegraph" that, "For conscripts who show up with breast implants we have set up a committee of three doctors who will check the draftees' reactions to certain stimuli." Details of the testing are apparently a military secret, or at least something the Army personnel just, uh, don't tell.

Demet Demir Under Siege Again

Leading Istanbul activist for LGBT rights Demet Demir now has police standing watch around the clock outside her home -- the same Beyoglu district police she's charged with torturing her in a case now before the courts, according to the civil rights group Lambda Istanbul. Anyone leaving or trying to enter the building is arrested as a "suspect," and one of her transsexual friends had, at last report, not yet been released after being picked up there. The posting of three officers outside her residence began on December 12, concurrent with her lawsuit, and continued at least through December 16, leaving Demir afraid to leave her home. Lambda has called for letters and faxes of protest to several local and national officials.

Her case, in which Amnesty International has taken an active interest, includes medical testimony that she was tortured while in custody for three days in July, after being arrested for "insulting police," of which she was later found not guilty. (The "insult," according to Demir, was that she had tried to intervene when she saw police beating a young woman who'd just come from one of Demir's job training workshops for transgenders). Demir this year received the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's (IGLHRC) Felipa de Souza Human Rights Award (and by the way, the deadline for submitting nominations for the 1998 awards is January 20).

The largely homosexual, transsexual and transvestite population, forced by their illegal status into the ghetto of the Beyoglu district, have long suffered horrendous police persecution. That harassment has included not only capricious arrests and beatings, but also the burning of their homes and the shut-off of drinking water to the neighborhood. Even some who legally owned their own homes have been evicted from them. Both IGLHRC and ILGA, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, have tried to use international pressure to improve the situation.

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